How to Get More Traffic Faster To a Small Web Site

So you have a small website that doesn’t seem to get much traffic to and you want more. What can you do quickly, to start getting quality traffic to your website today?

Good Question.

The most important part of all this is to have as much control over your website as you can. Just because a service may say they are doing some of these things, it’s always best that you follow up and make sure it is being done or do it yourself just to make sure.

First off, I am going to assume you have a Gmail account. This will open you up to a lot of free services that Google offers webmasters to not only drive more visitors (traffic) to your website but services that can help you identify where they are coming from, when they are leaving or why they aren’t finding you at all.

No Gmail? Don’t want a Gmail account? Some people have an aversion to anything Google, get over it. This is not about you, it’s about your website and getting quality traffic. Think of your website as your child because they really do become one!! So get one for the website. Google is the largest search engine in the world and it is the one thing that can help you when you need traffic.

Submit a Site Map to Google

Google has what’s called search console. Also known as Webmaster Tools. Here, you can keep an eye on your website. First thing is to submit a Site Map and get the website verified. A sitemap is what tells the search engines what you have cataloged on your blog. The pages, the images, and all the technical stuff that sits in the background. It tells the search engines and their spiders, how to walk thru your website. Google likes to put its customers first. So anything you do here gets into their search engines ASAP.

Google has instructions on how to create a sitemap or check your hosting company.

What you did for Google, you can also do the same thing with Bing. Yes, Bing is a popular search engine and you need to be in it as well. But Google is where I would focus my attention first. Bing Webmaster Tools

Get a Google Plus Page for your website

As with a lot of social media platforms, it’s best to have the business page with Google Plus. Again, this is set up using your Gmail account. Google Plus Business Pages are perfect for online as well as brick and mortar businesses. Being Google-owned, when you submit something to your GPlus page, it gets indexed and fed to the search engines almost immediately. More on that later.

Feed The Search Engines

When you write for your website, you are feeding two audiences. The first and most important audience is your reader. Always think of singular. You are talking to one person. Use common words, not too technical unless you know for a fact this is your audience. Many great bloggers call the reader Their “Avatar”. They know who they are and can describe them almost to the make and model of the car the atypical reader drives or doesn’t drive.

How would you talk to this person if you met them for lunch one day? That’s how you write in your blog.

The second audience, are the search engines. Writing for them and making your website search engine friendly is the basis for what is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The more the search engines know about the wonderful benefits your website has for your readers, the better the search engines can find and send quality traffic to your website.

Most “Guru’s” like to sell training packages and webinars on how to write for the search engines, helping to make the search engines your friend. But most search engines today are very sophisticated and are looking for the websites meant for the long run. They want to find websites that are reader-based, reader-friendly. They know when you are writing for the search engines or you are writing for the reader and will reward or penalize you for that.

I prefer to write for the reader and make it more “organic”, more real. I want the search engines and my readers to start to naturally find me and to want to come back each time they see I have something new. Writing for a quick surge in readers or to get a flood of traffic to your website may be good for this week, but it will kill you in the long run as readers figure out what you are up to and if the search engines change anything in the way they do their search, you are going to be hurting.

Write and post for the reader, making the growth organic helps keep you safe when the search engines make any major changes to its search algorithm.

Today, the search engines are looking for websites that create good, original, informative material and they do it on a regular basis. Making a new post at least once a week will keep you on the search engines radar and they will see the pattern and start to return as often as they see you are posting. SO the more you post on a regular basis, the more they know to come back and index what you have.

The recommended length is always the big question. But most of the SEO professionals tell us to keep it at least 500 words, preferably over 1,000 words if you can without starting to repeat yourself or start to not be informative or entertaining. Some people like to write a short 300-word post then add another 500-word advertisement for themselves. The search engines know that trick and don’t like it. Don’t do it.

Search Engines Love Images

Break the post up with images that relate to the post. Name the image and make sure the name has some relation to what you are writing about. Don’t take the image right off the camera, edit it for size then post it with the camera name (IMG.23432) You want the search engines to know what is on the image (myposttitle.jpg)

Hoover Your Mouse Over these Images and see what they say.

Edit the image to size. Never post a large image than want your website to shrink it. It still loads the full-size image and takes up too much bandwidth and time. Images on my website are never more than 800 pixels wide and they are compressed using a program called kraken That is an affiliate link. They do offer free and paid plans. I like them because they work best without distorting the image.

I could write a book just on posting images. But will save that for a later date! This post is just for some quick tips to get the traffic rolling in.

Internal and External Linking

Have you ever gone to Wikipedia? Ever wonder why when you do a search, a Wikipedia site is usually one of the top 5 recommendations? It’s because of linking. Each post has dozens of links to other posts on their website. Each link is worded to be relevant to the article you are reading and the link takes you to a page that has information that is pertinent to what you’re reading now. Search engines like that.

Talking about Ford Motor Company and the links will go to pages that talk about ford motor company products. Now if they went to pages about fishing, or maybe about how to grow your own soup cans, then they would not rank as high and would probably even be de-listed for that trick. Keep the links relevant. Send your reader to a page inside your website that can give them more information. Make the link state what it’s doing. “Click To Read More” doesn’t help the reader or the search engines. If you are talking about the “Ford V-8” and you want to send them to a page inside your website that talks more about Ford, its motors or the V8, then that would be the link they reader would understand as well as the search engine spiders.

The longer you can keep the reader on your website, the more pages they can follow on your website, the more love the search engines will give your website.

Same goes for external linking. Send them to a website that is better than yours, more popular and in the same niche or topic. Sending them to specific pages in Wikipedia for instance. Or if there is a news article on your topic, reference it and send them off to a specific article on the CNN news or some other “trusted” website.

You want the search engines to see there is a connection from your website to higher, “authority” sites. The sites that are more popular, busier and important. If one of these sites link back to your site, Congratulations!!

Fast Indexing of a New Post

Whenever you have a new post, you want to tell the world about it ASAP. Most importantly, you want Google to know about that new post and you want to tell them what it’s about. The best and fastest way to do that is once you hit “Publish” on your website, shoot over to your Google Plus account and make another post about your new post and include a link to your new post.

Don’t just post a “Look, we have a New Post” then the link. Tell me, the reader and the Google search engine why I should read the new post. Make it informative and conversational. Maybe make it an opinion or a thought on why you wrote that post. The less you duplicate your post word per word on the social media sites, the better.

Google also offers a generic “submit a site” tool for anyone to use. But I do prefer the Google plus because it’s always there and always getting indexed. Again, the more you post your updates and other conversations there, the more Google will love coming back to visit.

While on your Google Plus, hit up a few friends and forums. Leave a few comments and ask a few questions. Start to let people know who you are. Yes, G+ is not as huge as FaceBook, but it does have a great built-in community that likes to feed each other new content and recommendations. I.e. Your links…

Get On YouTube

Don’t have any videos of your own? Who cares. Get your YouTube channel started. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Find some really great videos on your topic and embed those videos on your website and talk about the video, linking back to YouTube.

Have a smartphone? Cool, now make a video and get it on YouTube. Inside the description of the video, put a link back to your website as well as your favorite social media profiles like Facebook.

Social Media Backlinks

On your website, make sure everyone can easily find the links to your social media profiles like Twitter and Facebook. On Facebook and Twitter, make links back to your website in the “about me” section.Fill out these profiles because these profiles are seen by a lot more people than you realize and of course, some of the more popular search engines.

What some of the smarter marketers do is install (if you have WordPress) a plugin like PrettyLink and they create a special link for social media. That link takes the reader back to a specific article or post instead of just to the home page. So let’s say on Twitter, it asks for your website and you would normally put in mywebsite.org. But now you put in mywebsite.org/one. The reader clicks on that and it goes to whatever you told PrettyLinks to send them to on your website. You have it set up to send them to your favorite/most popular/newest /post.

Go over your website and see what points you have already done and what needs to be updated. Let me know what you think in the comments below or hit me up if you need more help